1655971 - JAWS and Firefox very slow together in Gmail

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect, P3)

Description

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]: High visibility bug between accessibility support in Firefox and the major commercial assistive technology vendor in one of the most used web applications out there: Gmail.

When using Firefox and JAWS together, performance is very bad in Gmail. Many other pages, even those with big tables such as a Pushlog view on M-C, or a SearchFox results page or file view, are OK when compared to NVDA. But Gmail exhibits the following problems:

1. Arrowing through a list of conversations such as Inbox takes 1.5 to 2 seconds before the newly focused item is spoken.
2. When composing a message, each focus event such as when tabbing, or when entering recipients, and autocomplete results are being displayed, takes a second or more to react and speak the newly focused item.

Both of these problems go away when turning off JAWS's virtual buffer with JAWSKey+Z.

Something is causing JAWS to constantly rebuild its virtual buffer. Even after we stopped recreating accessible objects unnecessarily, see bug 686400, this is happening.

I've reached out to Vispero, the vendor of JAWS, and the lead developer on their support for Firefox has indicated that he'll look into it from their end, too.

Filing this so it is tracked on our end.

Comment 1

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Asa, do you know if this is a new issue in 81 or a pre-existing one?

Comment 2

[Sean Voisen (:svoisen)]

I don't think this is an issue new to 81, but rather something that was recently noticed since Marco started more testing with JAWS.

Comment 3

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

This bug is marked P1/S2 which would mean that we want a fix in one of our releases in flight. Yet this is a one year old bug and it is unassigned. Can this bug be retriaged? Is that still an issue? Thanks

Comment 4

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

I still believe this to be a very severe issue for the users it affects. That said, any improvements for this on our side will come from the major re-architecture we're currently working on (bug 1694563), but that's many months away from being usable. It's possible there could be some fixes within the JAWS screen reader, but those would have to be implemented by the vendor and discussion on that has stalled.

Comment 5

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

This is resolved by Cache the World, which is enabled by default in Firefox 113.